ystem
thoroughly established, and, above all, in the vast power of the
national idea, a power weakened by every day's delay. This is so true
that already men began to talk of the rival governments at Montgomery
and Washington, and Canadian journals to recommend a strict neutrality,
as if the independence and legitimacy of the mushroom despotism of New
Ashantee were an acknowledged fact, and the name of the United States
of America had no more authority than that of Jefferson Davis and
Company, dealers in all kinds of repudiation and anarchy. For more than
a month after the inauguration of President Lincoln there seemed to be
a kind of interregnum, during which the confusion of ideas in the
Border States as to their rights and duties as members of the "old"
Union, as it began to be called, became positively chaotic. Virginia,
still professing neutrality, prepared to seize the arsenal at Harper's
Ferry and the navy-yard at Norfolk; she would prevent the passage of
the United States' forces "with a serried phalanx of her gallant sons,"
two regiments of whom stood looking on while a file of marines took
seven wounded men in an engine-house for them; she would do everything
but her duty,--the gallant Ancient Pistol of a commonwealth. She
"resumed her sovereignty," whatever that meant; her Convention passed
an ordinance of secession, concluded a league offensive and defensive
with the rebel Confederacy, appointed Jefferson Davis commander-in-chief
of her land-forces and somebody else of the fleet she meant to steal at
Norfolk, and then coolly referred the whole matter back to the people
to vote three weeks afterwards whether they _would_ secede three weeks
before. Wherever the doctrine of Secession has penetrated, it seems to
have obliterated every notion of law and precedent.

The country had come to the conclusion that Mr. Lincoln and his cabinet
were mainly employed in packing their trunks to leave Washington, when
the "venerable Edward Ruffin of Virginia" fired that first gun at Fort
Sumter which brought all the Free States to their feet as one man. That
shot is destined to be the most memorable one ever fired on this
continent since the Concord fowling-pieces said, "That bridge is ours,
and we mean to go across it," eighty-seven Aprils ago. As these began a
conflict which gave us independence, so that began another which is to
give us nationality. It was certainly a great piece of good-luck for
the Government that they h